Customers might find themselves unable to use some of Alfa-Bank’s Yekaterinburg-based offices on June 11-18, 2009. According to the bank’s official website, this has to do with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in the city that week, with limitations also imposed on automobile and pedestrian travel. This is why Alfa-Bank suggests that their customers have all the transactions done at their outlets at 42 Malyshev St., 17 Gorki St., and 3 Khimikov Lane carried out in advance.

Sky Express, a low-cost airline, flew 217,661 passengers in the four months of 2009, which is 16% less than in the first four months of 2008, the carrier’s press officer reports. ‘Now that the whole Russian air industry is going trough some trouble, Sky Express’s main challenge is to keep up with last year’s passenger turnover figures and the number of operated flights,’ says the company’s General Director Marina Bukalova. In fact, the airline’s passenger turnover amounted to 305,457,726 passenger-kilometers in January-April 2009, which falls short of last year’s figures by 17.5%. In the

The amount of steel produced by Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) since the day of the launch has recently exceeded 700 million tons. The enterprise produced its first batch of steel on July 8, 1933 using the plant’s No.1 Martin furnace. In 1936, a large Martin furnace shop with a dozen 150-ton furnaces was completed, whereas fifty years later, the enterprise had as many as three such shops with thirty-five furnaces altogether. MMK then used to produce up to 16 million tons of steel a year. In addition, an oxygen converter shop was launched in 1990, to become the world’s most

‘Instead of the five new automobile showrooms we had been planning on, only three of them will get commissioned in Yekaterinburg this year. This has to do with the current economic difficulties in the country,’ the Commodities Market Committee’s expert Galina Kosareva said to an UrBC reporter. ‘For one, the construction of GAZ-Center’s showroom in Scherbakov St. had to be stopped. In fact, this car factory had been unable to produce any new cars until they got a government loan. Whether this loan is going to change things for the better remains yet to be seen,’ she explained. The showroom was

Pnevmostroymashina’s stockholders agreed in the course of the annual general meeting that they should pass the dividend for 2008. Besides, the profit for the previous year is to remain undistributed because of the business’s losses. In addition, the stockholders approved of the company’s annual report for 2008 and elected the BOD members.

‘Things look very complicated and unclear at Uralvagonzavod. What is happening there now looks strikingly similar to what Kakha Bendukidze did at Uralmashzavod, and this turned out to be a recipe for disaster,’ Governor of Sverdlovsk Region Eduard Rossel said at a recent press conference in Yekaterinburg. In fact, Uralvagonzavod’s GD Nikolai Malykh was fired and Gazkomerz BOD Chairman Oleg Sienko was chosen to succeed him in April 2008. ‘Plenipotentiary Representative of Russian Federation President in Ural Federal District Nikolai Vinnichenko and I have come to an agreement. I do want the